... Marx's Historical Materialism is in fact "nothing other than a pathetic gesture," "an exceedingly rationalistic doctrine," "in its deepest foundation an idealistic examination of society" etc. etc. ... (83).
Marx!!
"did not understand"
Hegel
97 and others.
... "agitational motives"... (84) (ibid. 86, 92 and others) (115 and others).
Marx adopted "this natural-scientific empiricism" (88), "Marx naturalizes the science of society" (ib.).
... "His" (Marx's) "path is not the path of a thinker, but ... a prophet of freedom"... !!! (94-95).
Socialist revolution = subjective hope, to pass it off as "objective scientific cognition" "is a delusion degenerated into charlatanry of a dreamer in a state of ecstasy" (p. 110).
!!
... "In Marx... passionate will dominated that of a radical apostle of freedom"... (111).
!!
Marx, "agitatorially whipping up all instincts of hatred"... (115).
inde
ira!!*
"Marxism... becomes the ethic of abstractly-negative, fanatical enthusiasm" (like Mohammedanism according to Hegel!)... (120).
... "Fanatical temperament" of Marx (and his "hot head") — that is the essence (120).
And so forth — vulgar trash!
Where is this citation from? The author does not indicate.
"Without revolution socialism cannot be realized. It requires this political act, insofar as it requires destruction and disintegration. But where its organic activity begins, where its self-purpose reveals its soul, there socialism casts off the political shell."
NB
NB
* - hence the rage!! Ed.
362
V. I. LENIN
— Having cited this passage without indicating its source, Plenge continues: "The 'political shell' which falls away is, of course, the whole of Marxism" (129).
How Plenge finds "contradictions": Marx supposedly wrote in the *Rheinische Zeitung*
An example of Plenge's critique of the theory of surplus value*:
"Through its crude exaggeration it emphasizes with the utmost inflammatory clarity that cruel fact of capitalism, that the striving for profit lowers wages and worsens working conditions. But it suffers from an elementary error of duplicating concepts, concealed by the terminology employed"... (157).
... "By virtue of agitational necessity the inflammatory theory of surplus value is placed in the most prominent position in the entire system"... (164).
... "Marx — the revolutionary Jew of the nineteenth century, who refashioned the borrowed garment of our great philosophy for his own purposes" (171).
This arch-vulgarizer Plenge — zero is the scientific worth of his little book.
Written no later than June 1916.
First published in 1933
in the Lenin Miscellany XXII

Printed from the manuscript.
"Clever"
!!
Pearl!!
* - theory of surplus value. Ed.
363
III